Saturday, March 10 2001

Alain Dubuc : "The result is a Canadian identity that is extremely vulnerable,

because the soul of the people comes to depend not on the citizens, or values, but instead on government programs, civil servants and budgets. A budget crisis -- or even relatively innocuous acts such as closing a railway link or shutting down a regional radio station -- become nation-destroying gestures. ... Another much more disquieting perverse effect is the development in Canada of an ideological orthodoxy. In Quebec, there are pressures that discourage intellectuals from straying from sovereigntist dogma without running the risk of exclusion and mistrust. I know something about this. The same process is at work in the rest of Canada, through the Canadian social model. It is difficult to be a true Canadian without espousing the centre-left values that underlie our welfare state."

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Dave Winer : "To say that open source created today's Internet

is to ignore... About all you can say is that today's Internet was developed by developers." About all you can say about today's art is that it is made by modern artists. This is a spurious argument at best. It suggests that somehow the Internet would not exist without said list of software that should not be ignored when in fact it is just a list of software that people ended up using. Is the Internet a better place because websites were written with BBEdit? Please. True, the web might not have evolved as quickly as it did if we'd all kept using Mosaic, but would Netscape have ever happened without it? Sorry buddy, but today's Internet --commercial or otherwise-- was created with *BSD, Linux, Apache, Sendmail, BIND and Perl and, notwithstanding a pretty cool outliner that more people use for websites when it's free than when it's not, you know it.

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